A precocious child who had developed a sophisticated drawing style, Diego Rivera entered the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City at the age of ten. There he studied with the leading academic painters of the era, Santiago Rebull, Jose Salome Pina, Felix Parra, and Jose Maria Velasco, who emphasized draftsmanship, classical form, and the scientific investigation of nature.

Rivera spent one year studying in Spain (1907); four years later, he moved from Mexico to Paris, where he stayed for ten years. There he became part of the circle of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in the area of Montparnasse. While he longed to be part of the political revolutions in Mexico and Russia, it was not until 1920, when he received a commission to paint murals for the new Mexican government, that his dream of creating revolutionary art was realized. Before returning home to Mexico, he traveled throughout Italy for a year, studying Early Christian and Byzantine mosaics as well as Renaissance frescoes and formulating his ideas for the mural monuments. Rivera completed eight major murals on historical subjects in Mexico between 1921 and 1931; during this time he became deeply interested in the ancient art of Mexico.

In 1929, Rivera married Frida Kahlo, a painter and compatriot who, like himself, held idealist Marxist views and through her art and life expressed a renewed interest in Mexican folk culture.

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